Friend recommendation in social multimedia networks.

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.With the rapid development of computer science and internet technologies, social media and social network has experienced explosive growth over the last decades. Social websites, such as Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter, have billions of users who share photos, videos and opinions, they also make friends on these websites. On-line friendship is an emerging topic that attracts the attentions from both economists and sociologists. The study of the on-line friendship, on one hand, can help the on-line merchants to find their potential customers, and thus make more precise recommendations; on the other hand, it helps to get a deep understanding of the relationships among different people. However, individuals’ on-line friend making behaviour is relatively complex and may be affected by many different factors. For example, an individual might make on-line friends with others because they discuss a hard mathematical problem, or it is possible that he/she makes a friend because they both enjoy a film. The reasons for friend making behaviours are likely to be diverse. Traditional friend recommendations that have been widely applied by Facebook and Twitter are often based on common friends and similar profiles such as having the same hobbies or working on a similar topic, which usually can not make a precise recommendation, due to the complexity of the problem. In this thesis, I, with my collaborators, try to give some solutions of on-line social friend recommendation from several aspects. In general, I contribute more than 85% of this thesis. One problem for social friend recommendation is that how shall we find the important social features that would highly influence individuals’ friend making behaviours. Usually, the reason an individual A would make friends with another person B is not that A is satisfied with all the characteristics of B, but that he/she has interest in some factors that B has illustrated. These factors can be viewed as instructive social features for friend recommendation tasks. So in this thesis, we first discuss the important social features for friend recommendation. Chapter 3 provides a general algorithm of important feature selection that can be applied in different fields such as biological and face image classification. The idea is to project the high dimensional data into lower dimensional space and select the important features that preserve both the global and local similarity structures of the datasets. Chapter 4 extends the basic idea of Chapter 3 to the field of social networks, and consider the friend recommendation task from the view of the network structure. First we consider the tag features. The important tag features are chosen so that the Flickr tag similarity network looks similar to the Flickr contact network. In other words, Flickr tag similarity network is aligned to the contact network by selecting the important tag features. This network alignment method can also be applied to more than one networks. In Chapter 5 we begin to take the image features into consideration. It would be relatively difficult to analyse the multi-domain data simultaneously. In this thesis we design a multi-stage scenario to consider the information from one domain in one stage. In this way, not only the complexity of the problem is reduced, but we can also make a deep analysis about the contributions of the information from different domains. For the algorithm proposed in Chapter 5, for the first stage we utilise the tag information similarly as the method suggested in Chapter 4, for the second stage we propose a co-clustering method that clusters the contact information, tag and image feature information simultaneously to refine the final recommendation result. To further improve the recommendation accuracy, in Chapter 6 we apply a topic model based method in the second stage, instead of the co-clustering method proposed in Chapter 5. The reason for the improvement is that co-clustering method can not provide a precise rank of the recommendation list, but the topic model can give a quantitative analysis of the friendship between two individuals. In this chapter we also provide a new method to find the solution of the topic model, which is different from the widely applied Gibbs sampling, variational inference or the matrix factorization method. The idea is to analytically express the solution of the integral of two random variables, in a series form. In this way we can determine the solution of the probabilistic model precisely, which is better than the traditional Gibbs sampling, variational inference or matrix factorization methods. In Chapter 7, with the help of widely discussed Deep Learning (DL) Framework, we develop a staged DL-based friend recommendation method. In the first stage, the text and image information is correlated to learn some features via convlutional neural network. In the second stage, the features are refined by the users’ clustering information via another deep neural network. The methods mentioned in Chapter 4, 5, 6 and 7 are applied in a dataset that collected from the widely used image sharing website Flickr. It contains tens of thousands of users, hundreds of thousands tags and millions of images to predict the on-line friendship between users. The performance of these recommendation methods is examined by precision, recall and F-measure. These methods give some insightful knowledge about individuals’ online relationship and we hope these methods can help social websites to design their recommendation algorithms

Who are Like-minded: Mining User Interest Similarity in Online Social Networks

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Ask the GRU: Multi-Task Learning for Deep Text Recommendations

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